This course focuses on understanding subsistence marketplaces and designing business solutions for the billions of people living in poverty in the global marketplace. To develop understanding of subsistence marketplaces, we use exercises to enable participants to view the world from the eyes of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, facilitate bottom‐up understanding generated by participants, and provide insights from extensive research. More broadly, the course uses the context of extreme resource constrained contexts to learn about the bottom-up approach pioneered through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative, and apply it in any context. The course will involve virtual immersion in subsistence contexts, emersion of unique insights, bottom-up design, innovation and enterprise. A parallel project will focus on understanding a specific need in a subsistence marketplace, and designing a solution and an enterprise plan.
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
• Develop an understanding of subsistence marketplaces
• Design solutions for subsistence marketplaces
• Develop enterprise plans to implement solutions for subsistence marketplaces
• Apply the bottom-up approach for subsistence marketplaces as well as other contexts
This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

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From the lesson

Module 4: Bottom-Up Enterprise

In this module you will learn about understanding needs in subsistence contexts. You will also learn about a structured approach to generating ideas for addressing the needs in subsistence marketplaces.

Taught By

Madhu Viswanathan

Diane and Steven N. Miller Professor in Business

Transcript

[SOUND] The next set of lessons are about the essence of the bottom-up approach. The first lesson is the ultimate principle, if all else fails I will do it myself. Now, this is a good way to double up one-zone capabilities, it's not practical to do but it's important to be able to do if needed. This lesson also feeds into learning about the implementation. This lesson also feeds into knowing the forest, the trees, and so on. The ability to do a number of things one self, also is a way to engender trust, both with communities, and with team members. Being Bottom-Up is the opposite of being hands off. And essentially saying it's not my job. It's the exact opposite of that. It's really about if all else fails, I will do it myself. That does not mean that we micromanage. That does not mean that we get them them the weeds all the time. It just means that we are able to micromanage. We're able to be in the weeds when needed. Another lesson in the essence of the Bottom-Up approach is the ultimate Bottom-Up enterprise model. Doing what it takes for each other. This is how we go about what we do. It is a bit like family even though it's not a family business. Being there during tough times is very important. This often means that the professional and the personal get mixed, but we have to keep finding ways to collect them and to separate them. I'm not saying it's always healthy to mix the professional with the personal, but if you don't take care of the personal sometimes the professional will not happen. These are not people who live in compartments and can keep them separate. These compartments are blurred for people, the personal and the professional and so on. And it's important to react and to create an organization that also blurs when this needs to be blurred. But also keeps them in separate compartments when it's needed. Another lesson is to be intensely practical and uncompromisingly idealistic. This is really the way to break this the Lamar this trade off, being very high on both dimensions. This occurs in a number of different ways. We have some broad guiding principles in terms of the integrity of our education. But we have to be very practical in how we make it happen. We have to make sure that the education and the program are suited to the logistics and a variety of other constraints. But at the same time, we try to do that without compromising the integrity of the education. That's one arena in which this plays out. Under the arena in which this plays out, is in terms of working with people who have very good intentions, but don't know how to translate this into action. Now, this is a good currency to have. To care about the community, and to want to do good. And once that currency is there, we try to build around it, but we also emphasize a lot of action that goes along. There's a time for meetings, but not endless meetings. And so, we have learned to work with people who have good intentions and emphasize how to translate those good intentions to actions as well. This is also related to how we emphasize and create incentives. Often we have this notion that people living in poverty have to be completely entrepreneurial and we will reward them for every task they do on a very discreet basis. That is not a very fair way of looking at things, when we are sales don't seek that kind of entrepreneurial incentive. We are looking for safety. We are looking for certainty, and so one of the ways we approach being idealistic and being practical, is to have people dedicate or semi-dedicate their time. And to lay out a certain time frame when they deliver on certain things. This way, the promises are kept small and we also have people dedicate some portion of their time to the task at hand. This, we believe is more practical than having this notion that people have to be completely entrepreneurial. And would be willing to take that uncertainty upon themselves in order to work with us. The final lesson is that the lessons we discussed are about the dance between the Bottom-Up, and the Top-Down. Having some guiding principles as top down, but adapting it to different circumstances as Bottom-Up. Responding to people's adversities isBottom-Up. But articulating the value equation as a result is Top-Down. So many of the lessons that we discussed are about the dance between the Bottom-Up and the Top-Down. And this is a lesson in the essence of the Bottom-Up approach. [SOUND]

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